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In Vancouver, 2036, people are tired of the smog and the rain. They're willing to give up a lot for guaranteed sunshine.

Don't think about what you're losing, think about what you're getting — a life with no wasted hours sleeping or commuting. A life free of crime and disease. A life that ends when you want it to, not when some faceless entity decides it's your time.

tdated, but stable - like the rest of the equipment, she had scooped it up when the genetics department was phased out.

She called up her active in silico experiments - two had been birthed alive. One was a three-headed fluke she had called Cerberus, and the other had a single eye in the middle of its forehead. She focused in on the Cyclops fluke first, noting with satisfaction that it was blinking normally - the last version had been birthed with a messed-up eyelid. She called up the Cerberus fluke. It wasn't doing as well, only one of the three heads breathing normally.

She zoomed in on the organs and got the computer to diagnose. The heart glowed red, 125% the normal rate. The lungs were within normal parameters this time, although still a little off. Nicky sighed. Maybe three heads aren't better than one...

She went back to the Cyclops and introduced different stimuli. The model fluke barked happily when it was introduced to food pellets, sexual partners, and petting. It looked good to Nick

An excellent book. Munroe fully imagines a post-singularity world in which that singularity arrives not with a bang but a protracted, shuddering whimper. This a book that combines detailed projections--of technology, of culture, of morality--combined with a queer, concrete lyricism; forget Kurt Anderson; Munroe is the Tom Wolfe for the tech-equipped post-millennial set.

The ending, described in posts below, is a bit jarring, but, as far as I can tell, is part of an overall shift in the accepted form of the novel withing the science fiction genre (a similar denoument occurs in "Somebody Comes to Town, Somebody Leaves Town," a novel published contemporaneously). It will be interesting to see where it leads.

While we may at some time be able to simulate whole brains on computers, the concept of 'uploading' persons is flawed. At the most, you'll make a clone. That the author didn't think enough about that doesn't impact his storytelling which is fine and I could have read on, as well as the story could have gone on, since it wasn't really finished.

Um, and why would uploaded bodies be needed for work when you could just create or bake them as you please, is beyond me. Mech robots are the future, anyway.

I absolutely loved this book. It's a vision of the future that I would never have imagined myself, but I was able to delve into the story (or stories, as it follows several intertwined characters) and believe that it was plausible.

It doesn't have the most "tidy" ending, but it leaves room for the reader's imagination to "fill in the blanks". A sequel in the works, perhaps?

this, like most of Munroe's later works seems to suffer from his perception that he doesn't need END his books. after reading recent Munroe, the average reader is left thinking "huh? where's the rest of the book" The feeling that Munroe didn't care enough about his characterr or readers to finish the book is the most felt in this novel. Of course, the change in writing style comes with his recent change in politics from indie publisher to Walmart supporter, one can't help but think that there's a connection.